Revisiting the Original Reviews of Windows Vista

harrymcc writes 'We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution--but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.'

Comments

Vista

[sopssa]

I dont think Vista was that bad OS after a little bit more powerful hardware came out and after you got used to it. It feels a bit more sluggish than XP but that's what Win7 improves with their move responsive UI (which is really important thing that always seems to be forgotten - just compare Opera to Firefox)

Everyone who have started using Win7 already are saying it's great. Even those who skipped Vista completely. Personally I will probably move from Vista once I get a new computer - I dont want to do an update nor move all the files and settings in place and install new programs right now (and more so because I will probably get a new computer soon anyway)

One of the failure points for Vista was that all the drivers had to be redone and released for it. Even if it's a better thing now that it happened, it was bad to be in the first ones. But this time they all work in Win7 too, so that's not an issue.

What comes to UAC, it's the correct direction, but lots of Windows userbase is general audience which would get annoyed with such in Linux and other OS too. Atleast it's there now, and those who dont like it can disable it.

Most of the problems with Vista was actually that it was taking Windows OS into new direction and probably needed that one OS release in between to get there and so that users get familiar and used with it.

Re:Vista

[underqualified]

i agree. aside from needing a lot more memory than what was considered "standard" at the time of its release, vista wasn't bad at all. i think everyone was just riding on the stay-away-from-vista band wagon. it's just sad that the general public believe the opinions of 12-yr-old geek wannabes or 40-yr-old bloggers who don't even know the difference between java and javascript.

Re:Vista

[Hijacked Public]

And needing more graphics power than was considered normal in order to display a modern UI.

And UAC being maybe the most annoying thing ever added to any piece of software ever.

And inexpicably long file transfer times.

And backward compatibility.

I used the Vista RCs extensively and couldn't stand them, even on excellent hardware. This past weekend I spent an hour or so helping a friend set up his new Vista laptop and network and was reminded of why I can't stand Vista even on hot off the presses high end laptop hardware. The UI lags no matter how much computing power you throw its way. UAC still requires multiple approvals before executing one task. Even with an SSD traversing directories is still too slow.

I've been running the Win 7 RC and have to say that it appears to fix most all of Vista's problems apart from UAC. It is probably good enough to get me to take advantage of bootcamp, which Vista certainly was not.

Re:Vista

[dave420]

I don't know what hardware your friend has, or how you set it up, but Vista flies on my machines. The file transfer issue you talk about was fixed years ago - it can easily max out our gigabit ethernet at work. Backwards compatibility was indeed broken for drivers, as it uses a new driver model to increase stability. I've used vista for years, without re-installing it, and it's fine.

Re:Vista

[causality]

i agree. aside from needing a lot more memory than what was considered "standard" at the time of its release, vista wasn't bad at all. i think everyone was just riding on the stay-away-from-vista band wagon.

The real issue with Vista was that it didn't offer a good reason to upgrade for the many people who were satisfied enough with XP. It wasn't the staggering improvement over XP that XP was over Win98 and WinME. That's why the average person wasn't eager to install it and perhaps more importantly, neither were many corporations. Many who are more technically inclined felt that its improvements were not innovative but were instead evidence that Microsoft took some ten years to finally address some of the core flaws in XP. I personally think that stance is justifiable.

For example, UAC was the result of rampant malware infecting XP, yet a good designer could have told you before XP's release that most users running as "root" all of the time was asking for trouble. That's because other systems learned the importance of privilege separation and viewed it as a general design principle a very long time ago, before there was such a thing as Windows at all (think Multics, VAX, Unix). So now we have UAC so that the use of superuser capabilities can be limited, and if you listened to their marketing at the time, we were supposed to believe that this was innovation.

Having personally witnessed the various versions of Windows (since 3.1) slowly acquire user accounts, something like a distinction between superuser and normal user, network stacks, mount points, something like 'su' (RunAs), something like Sudo (UAC), I am reminded of that saying that "those who fail to understand Unix are doomed to reimplement it." Sometimes the word "poorly" is added to that sentence. The design principles we have seen and tested after decades of computing are sound, or they're not, yet much of the improvements I have seen in Windows were not due to robust basic design. Instead, they were reactions to the failures of earlier versions, which is not terribly innovative or interesting. I do see a lot of real innovation when it comes to OS-level support for DRM, but this doesn't make me want to run Vista either.

it's just sad that the general public believe the opinions of 12-yr-old geek wannabes or 40-yr-old bloggers who don't even know the difference between java and javascript.

It's sad that there are legitimate reasons to dislike something and that those good reasons often get drowned out by a bunch of demagoguery. You'd think the demagoguery would only be necessary in the absence of legitimate reasons, but some really seem to enjoy it. Others seem to have an axe to grind.

Call it a little devil's advocate, but I'd speculate as well that the abusive or at least "questionable" business practices of Microsoft (such as the ones for which they were convicted in multiple countries) and their willingness to use underhanded tactics like vendorlock haven't earned them many friends. While the average person just wants to browse the Web or run their office apps and really doesn't care, that only seems to make the minority who do care all the more vocal. Still, you can't worry too much about them if you trust in your own ability to know a reasonable argument when you see one.

Original slashdot readers review

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sucks, it's terrible, I've never used it...

"Some were downright enthusiastic."

[John Hasler]

Advertisements usually are.

Main Problem With Vista Was It Instantly Annoyed

[Anonymous Coward]

The legacy of Vista is the importance of first impressions.

for the majority of users, their first Vista experience was impeded by a slew of "you just clicked an icon! this is a security risk! are you sure??" messages, and "in order to run this program, you must have administrator privileges. do you want to run this as administrator now?" popup messages. it was very annoying, and blunted what could have been a fine experience with a shiny new OS.

This was by no means the most serious problem with Vista, but it had tremendous impact on its reception.

Re:OS Change

[Malc]

Vista ain't bad, and really Win7 isn't as different as Vista was to XP. I tried very hard for 10 years to use Linux. Not any more; it's too much work. When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS and desktop environment. So I'm happy using Windows at work, and Mac OS X at home. Each to their own though.

Re:OS Change

[Nerdfest]

Talking with some friends the other day, after trying to resolve some very annoying Windows configuration issues, we came to the realization that Windows is just not ready for the desktop.

Re:OS Change

[2.7182]

Dude, go easy on Malc. Did you see his user ID? He must be like 60 years old. Don't forget, he probably finds computers confusing, and has his some explain email to him. And he thinks that the "internet" is inside his computer. So be nice to the old folks. Seriously though, I think you missed his point, namely the line "to each his own."

Re:Follow The Money (from TFA)

[uassholes]

PC World (lots of MS ads):

The bottom line? "All in all, Windows Vista is a great leap forward for the operating system, with a much-improved, far more useful (and pleasurable) interface; faster, better search; beefed-up security that's a big improvement over Windows XP with SP2; and far, far better networking.

Forbes:

The bottom line? "Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out...

Message control, message control, message control

[QuoteMstr]

Vista sucking has a lot more to do with sociology than technology. The problem was that marketdroids severely understated Vista's hardware requirements, tried to segment the market too finely with too many editions, and outright lied about the user experience at some levels of hardware capability. What's what marketdroids do: they lie for profit.

But marketdroid lies notwithstanding, the underlying technology behind Vista wasn't bad: far from it, actually. For the first time, there's a half-decent security model for the average user. (I don't buy that UAC sucks.) There are a ton of kernel and API improvements behind the scenes. We have symlinks, even!

Sure, there were a couple release-day bugs, but every OS has those. XP had a similar number of pre-SP1 issues. And hell, it had fewer than the first version of RHEL5 (that OS paused for a full five minutes on every boot, polling SATA drives that never came, until a patch fixed the issue.)

The "Vista sucks" meme, however, spread virally because 1) we all love to hate Microsoft, and 2) most users really can't tell the difference between good technology and bad, but they can certainly parrot what their friends say. It doesn't help that Vista really did suck for some users who were running on underpowered hardware. (If you want to argue that Vista's hardware requirements are too high, we can do that, but Vista doesn't suck on the hardware for which it was designed.)

Really, Microsoft could just rebrand Vista as Windows 7 and release it today to great acclaim: in fact, that's precisely what they did. Since Vista's release, even low-end hardware has caught up to Vista's original requirements, so despite the inevitable lies from marketing, Vista^H^H^H^H^HWindows 7 will now run fine for a lot more people. The new name kills the old meme, and forces people to reconsider whether Vista sucks.

tl;dr: Vista doesn't suck on the hardware for which it was designed. In fact, it's a vast improvement. Marketing sucks for lying about what hardware you need for Vista, however, which put a bad taste in people's mouths.

tl;dr, no one cares, but here's mine

[b4dc0d3r]

I have been forced to use vista at work for the past month or so. Here are the things I hate, mostly from the first week. Keep in mind this is based on using 2000 and XP, and having certain expectations about how Windows in general is supposed to work. No one's going to read this, that's fine, I'm just spitting in a hurricane.

1. Explorer - if a heavy IO operation is in the background, explorer frequently says "not responding". I want that in the background, and regardless of IO settings, I should be able to browse the disk. What if the only way to stop the IO is a control panel, or an application I have to dig for? Like a virus scanner, which you can't run Windows without. We have a deadlock. It's the shell of the OS, not some random application.
2. I still can't tell what's highlighted. Which is the current active window? Which folder is highlighted in Explorer? Should this be useful out of the box, or should every user have to adjust this?
3. Search - I don't even know where to begin. "Search in files" only finds text in a known file type with a filter for it. Search happens only in indexed locations by default. So it won't find the program I just downloaded, but it will look for that term in my e-mail? You should at least be able to click "Advanced Search" instead of having to find the non-button-looking button. I can't tell if it's looking for a file name or in the contents of files. It's just plain unintuitive. I still have no idea where I'm searching.
4. "Folder Options" used to have a tab to manage file types. Vista moved this into a Defaults control panel, and you can no longer manage behaviours. Anything beyond the default "Open" action has to be done in the registry, which Microsoft says is dangerous and could cause the OS to stop working. This is reduced functionality, affecting how the OS interacts with files, which is pretty much the definition of a GUI shell.
5. "Add and remove programs" renamed to "Programs" or "Programs and features" for classic view, invalidating millions of documents and confusing users. Going in further to Windows components, using IIS as an example. You can turn on or off IIS options, directly from the Windows Components dialog - you can turn your web server Directory Listing on or off through the operating system control panel. Isn't that just a little too integrated? We just added more places you have to look to repair a malfunctioning application!
6. Search *STILL* includes shortcuts. I search for *.vsd and I get shortcuts. What purpose does this serve? If the documents exist they will be found. Otherwise the shortcut will point nowhere and be useless. You can't sort shortcuts either, they are all type "Shortcut". So you can't remove your audio file shortcuts and leave your excel file shortcuts. If I search for "xls" maybe that should return shortcuts, but *.xls is very specific.
7. Explorer: Very hard to select a column heading to change the width, because the completely unnecessary Sort selector is right next to it.
8. Drop object into command prompt to avoid retyping it. Dropped because high-security areas do not accept messages from low-security areas, design was fixed for win7
9. "Copy as Path" and "Open Command Prompt here" are only available when shift-clicking. Also not available on left side of explorer view
10. Alt-Enter doesn't work in left side of explorer pane
11. Not clear if the highlighted folder in left pane of explorer is the currently selected one - the selected and current highlights are nearly transparent by themselves, and only slightly different from each other. Makes it easy to accidentally delete a bunch of stuff
12. Mouse scroll-wheel does not work in explorer left pane, automatic scrolling is supposed to make things easier. But so does a mouse.
13. Explorer: Backspace is the same as CTRL+Left Arrow, making users use the different "ALT+UP"
    - duplicated functionality, users have to retrain their muscle memory. Makes sense, but loyal Windows users are